Monday, May 29, 2017

The
cover of the novel depicts Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek
philosopher who allegedly carried around a lit lantern in broad
daylight, saying he was “looking for an honest man”. But the Diogenes
shown here is black, jauntily clad in pink shirt and white trousers.

The
reading was poorly attended and a couple of readers had not managed
to read the novel. Nevertheless with a bit of urging they too read
from passages others had selected.

Paul Beatty - ‘I wanted to be a psychologist. It taught me how to look underneath the rock’

There's
a lot of drollery and sheer extravagance in the use of language,
sprinkled plentifully with mother-fuckers, bitches and psychology
jargon. The characters are often denizens of the absurd: Hominy
Jenkins who volunteers as slave to the narrator (‘Me’) and calls
him Massa in the manner of a
pre-Reconstruction era slave; a punk pretender called Foy Cheshire
who lives by publishing the ideas of Me's father and heads the Dum
Dum Donut Intellectuals. And Marpessa the attractive bus-driver Me
yearns for, who seems unattainable.

Preeti

Me
goes about his life work of

a)
Re-creating the erased town of agrarian Dickens in LA County, the
largest and most diverse county in USA whose population of 10m is
larger than that of 42 states; and

b)
Re-segregating its society so people may regain a sense of community,
identity and self-worth.

Thommo

Miraculously
he succeeds in both ventures, and the rejuvenated Dickens scores
higher on measures of social and educational progress than it ever
had before. However, he runs foul of the Civil Rights Act and ends up
facing judgement in the Supreme Court of the United Staes, refighting
the ‘separate-but-equal’ battles of the 1960s.

KumKum & Joe

Though
Me wins Marpessa by novel's end, since the case is unresolved, there's scope for a even crazier sequel.

Almond Nougat

Here
we are at the end of the reading after consuming the sweet almond
nougat Hemjit brought along:

Subscriptions
of Rs 300 for the year were taken up and given to Thommo for deposit.
He will tell us the bank balance next time. Dates for the next three
readings are fixed as follows:

June
15: Poetry of the English Romantics

July
7: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Aug
3: Poetry

1.
Sunil

As the selector of the novel Sunil gave an introduction to the writer, who was
born on June 9, 1962 in Los Angeles. The psychology in the novel
comes from the MA he did in the subject at Boston University; later
he completed an MFA from Brooklyn College which sharpened his
writing hunger. New York has a tradition of performing poetry in
cafés and PB became the Grand Poetry Slam champion of the Nuyorican
Poets Café in 1990. He published two poetry collections, Big
Bank Take Little Bank (1991) and Joker, Joker Deuce
(1994). Later he heard the phrase ‘spoken word
poetry’ and thought: ‘I’m not doing that! Whatever the fuck
that is!’

PB
was the first American to win the Man Booker Prize after the entry
was thrown open. Prior to 2014 only Commonwealth, Irish, and South
African (later Zimbabwean) citizens were eligible to receive the
prize; as Thommo said America always qualified on that score as the
first thirteen colonies had rebelled against George III.

PB
was the editor of a second book called Hokum: An Anthology of
African-American Humor. Writing an article
for the NY Times about the anthology he said:

I
wish I'd been exposed to this black literary insobriety at an earlier
age. It would've been comforting to know that I wasn't the only one
laughing at myself in the mirror.

PB
wrote three novels prior to The Sellout:
The White Boy Shuffle
(1996), Tuff (1998),
and Slumberland
(2008). Sunil cited
the comedian Sarah Silverman who said “Paul [Beatty] uses humor
like a surgeon uses anesthesia, a magician uses sleight of hand, or a
pickpocket charms you.”

In
the Acknowledgement the author pays tribute to a paper by the
psychologist William Cross which he read as a graduate student and
never forgot; The Negro-to-Black
Conversion Experience is about how black people undergo a gradual
change of identity in America in five stages.

Sunil
as a sidelight mentioned Paul Haggis, a filmmaker who, in 2006,
became the first screenwriter to write two Best Film Oscar winners
back-to-back – Million Dollar Baby
(2004) directed by Clint Eastwood, and Crash
(2004) which he himself directed. This excursus was to make the point
from the film Crash
[of which mention is made in passing in the novel] that racist
remarks stem more from ignorance rather than malice. Separating
characters into victims and offenders is demonstrated to be
misleading, as victims
of racism are themselves prejudiced in a different context.

Here
are a few video interviews which will add some information about the
novel from the author:

Thommo
noted that if you find a South Asian looking guy driving a cab in
America, he is more likely to be a Pakistani. But in New York you can
find Sikh taxi drivers, and they will point you to the dhabas
where they eat cheap but tasty food, if you ask. Sunil spoke of a
chap he knew in college who worked part-time in a Patel-motel in
America. Thommo spoke of his son-in-law who moved from Borneo to
Kuala Lumpur and works in logistics at Shell Oil. His hands-on
experience with earthmoving equipment has become quite valuable.

This
led to a discussion of the absurd attamari
system, which though technically abolished has come back with a
vengeance under the Left government, so that on P.T Usha Road in
order to bring down the floodlight towers on Maharaja's College sports ground, the nokkukuli
[charge for looking on and doing nothing] was levied at 50 paise per
brick, earned by these idlers.

2.
Hemjit

The
passage concerns Me's experience when his father takes him on a 3-day
drive to Mississippi to experience ‘direct discrimination.’ The
dad finds his own solace with a white woman, but Me is left behind to
quench his thirst, and experiences two kinds of discrimination: a Coke
that cost 7 cents in the white man's store costs a dollar fifty in
the black man's store. He can buy black or piss off, literally. The
second discrimination is to discover the loo to piss for black men
was filthy and buzzed with flies. His father made out okay facing no
discrimination, direct or otherwise, but Me was forced to piss on an anthill.

3.
Joe

The
passage on castration of male calves has a particular incongruity in
an urban setting for it is a typically agrarian occupation the
students are having demonstrated to them on Career Day at school. But
Dickens is just such an anomaly – a huge swath of farmland within
the largest urban megalapolis in America. The students have a field
day, and enjoy the bloodletting of castration and being told the
secrets of sex in the animal world:

grade-schoolers
intrigued enough to wade into the spreading pool of blood to get a
better look at the wound, while I wrestled with the still squirming
calf.

Of
course, there's a fund of jokes, “Don’t they got cow rubbers?”
The reader joins with the students and stands amazed to see all this
happen and learn the three methods of castration: surgical, elastic,
and bloodless. Such is the energy in the book and the abundance of
unusual experiences that once the reader has entered into the
zaniness, he's in for an enthralling ride. And Me enjoys his brief
stint as a lecturer on castration.

4.
KumKum

Finding
a sister city for Dickens, even with the help of a City
Match Consultant, turns out to be a difficult task. Finally three
candidates are identified: Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa. But Dickens is rejected by all three, and the reasons? – too violent says
Juárez, too polluted says Chernobyl, too black says Kinshasa. Me has
to face a recalcitrant Hominy who tells him: “I refuse to toil fo’
no massa who can’t manage a simple task such as finding a sister
city.”

5.
Preeti

Preeti
had come unprepared but Joe persuaded her to read the passage where
Me's father takes him on a drive of three days all the way from LA to
Mississippi so that he may learn about direct discrimination, so far
unknown to him. As with many adventures in the novel this one is
replete with black expressions for unusual acts, for example
“reckless eyeballing” which is “the act of a black male
deigning to look at a southern white female.” The reader is treated
to unusual similes for the size of female breasts (“like the
Hindenburg and the Goodyear blimp”), and the stupidity of a nigger
boy who doesn’t know how to wolf-whistle; he whistles the slow
sensuous tune of Ravel's
Boléro
instead, standing in the middle of the dusty street, starting slow
and soft and rising to a fever pitch! Dad sidesteps his son's failure
with his own “wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled
both the white woman’s pretty painted toes.” Rebecca responds,
and sonny boy is left in the lurch as dad makes off with her in the
car ...

Has
the son learned about direct discrimination or flagrant indiscretion?

6.
Thommo

Thommo
too was unprepared to read, not having received the book from the
store. KumKum provided him with an alternate passage of hers, which
details yet another of several experiments in which Me had been the
victim of his father's psychological research, acting he says “as
both the control and the experimental group.” The ostensible
purpose of this particular attempt was to teach him about the
‘bystander effect’ in which violence perpetrated on a person in
public is ignored by those watching it, so that “the more people
around to provide help, the less likely one is to receive help.”

Sadly,
the experiment goes wrong when his father attacked him
demonstratively on a public street; instead of watching curiously or
walking by, the public joined in, setting upon Me fiercely until he
had been beaten and choked senseless. The passage ends on a note of
fatherly contrition:

Pops
put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders and delivered an
apologetic lecture about his failure to take into account the
“bandwagon effect.”

Thommo
was quick to label this the ‘Calcutta syndrome’, one that he has
witnessed at close quarters. Once a pick-pocket was nabbed on the street
in that city and set upon by the crowd. Whereupon a passing bhadralok
asked Thommo (undergoing the bystander effect himself!) to kindly hold his satchel, and after going up to the
unfortunate fellow, rolling up his sleeve, and giving him a whack,
came back to retrieve his belongings and went on his way.

Preeti
mentioned a similar scene in a movie (Munna
Bhai)
where a pickpocket steals a wallet and when he is caught, the people
take it out on him, venting their frustrations from the office or the
home upon the unfortunate guy.

Thommo
mentioned a book on Shivaji someone wrote for which he wrote a comment. The
Sellout
has more than twenty such commendatory excerpts by various reviewers
in magazines, placed there to sell the book, ahead of the title page.

Readings

1.
Sunil

Whitey
Week, the wonders and contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race
to the world of leisure.
Ch 20, p.225

Sometimes
in homage to my father, if Hominy was on his lunch break or asleep in
the truck, I’d enter wearing Dad’s white lab coat and carrying a
clipboard. I’d hand the owner my card and explain that I was with
the Federal Department of Racial Injustice, and was conducting a
monthlong study on the effects of “racial segregation on the
normative behaviors of the racially segregated.” I’d offer them a
flat fifty-dollar fee and three signs to choose from: BLACK, ASIAN,
AND LATINO ONLY; LATINO, ASIAN, AND BLACK ONLY; and NO WHITES
ALLOWED. I was surprised how many small-business people offered to
pay me to display the NO WHITES ALLOWED sign. And like most social
experiments, I never did the promised follow-up, but after the month
was up, it wasn’t unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking
Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they
made their clientele feel special. “The customers love it. It’s
like they belong to a private club that’s public!”

It
didn’t take long to convince the manager of the Meralta, the only
movie theater in town, that he could cut his complaints in half if he
designated floor seating as WHITE AND NON-TALKERS ONLY, while
reserving the balcony for BLACKS, LATINOS, AND THE HEARING IMPAIRED.
We didn’t always ask permission; with paint and brush we changed
the opening hours of the Wanda Coleman Public Library from “Sun–Tue:
Closed, Wed–Sat: 10–5:30” to “Sun–Tue: Whites Only,
Wed–Sat: Colored Only.” As word started to spread of the success
Charisma was having at Chaff Middle School, every now and then an
organization would seek me out for a little personalized segregation.
In looking to reduce the youth crime rate in the neighborhood, the
local chapter of Un Millar de Muchachos Mexicanos (o Los Emes) wanted
to do something other than midnight basketball. “Something a little
more conducive to the Mexican and Native American stature,” a
sporting endeavor that didn’t require a lot of space where the kids
could compete on equal footing. Name-dropping the hoop success of
Eduardo Nájera, Tahnee Robinson, Earl Watson, Shoni Schimmel, and
Orlando Méndez-Valdez did nothing to dissuade them.

The
meeting was brief, consisting of two questions on my part.

First:
“Do you have any money?”

“We
just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star.”

Second:
“I thought they only did things for dying kids?”

“Exactly.”

During
the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act,
some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than
let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.
But in an inspired act of reverse segregation, we used the money to
hire a lifeguard who posed as a homeless person and built a “Whites
Only” swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence that the kids
loved to hop, so they could play Marco Polo and hold their collective
breaths underwater whenever they spotted a patrol car passing by.

When
Charisma felt that her students needed a counterbalance to the
onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing that took place
during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, I came up with the
one-off idea for Whitey Week. Contrary to the appellation, Whitey
Week was actually a thirty-minute celebration of the wonders and
contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race to the world of
leisure. A moment of respite for children forced “to participate in
classroom reenactments of stories of migrant labor, illegal
immigration, and the Middle Passage. Weary and stuffed from being
force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means
that you’ve all made it. It took about two days to convert the
long-out-of-business brushless car wash on Robertson Boulevard into a
tunnel of whiteness. We altered the signs so that the children of
Dickens could line up and choose from several race wash options:

Not Responsible for Scratches, Dents,and Items Left in theSubconscious”

To the
whitest music we could think of (Madonna, The Clash, and Hootie &
the Blowfish), the kids, dressed in bathing suits and cutoffs, danced
and laughed in the hot water and suds. Ignoring the amber siren
light, they ran under the waterfall of the not-so Hot Carnauba Wax.
We handed them candy and soda pop and let them stand in front of the
drying blast of the hot-air blowers for as long as they wanted.
Reminding them that having a warm wind blowing in your face was what
it felt like to be white and rich. That life for the fortunate few
was like being in the front seat of a convertible twenty-four hours a
day.

“That’ll
cost seven cents. Just leave it on the counter, boy. Your new mommy
be back in no time.”

Ten
sodas and seventy cents later, neither my new mother nor my old
father had returned and I had to take a wicked piss. The fellows at
the gas station were still playing chess, the attendant’s cursor
hovering hesitatingly over a cornered piece as if his next decision
decided the fate of the world. The attendant slammed a knight onto a
square. “You ain’t fooling nobody with that Sicilian gambit
chicanery. Your diagonals is vulnerable as shit.”

My
bladder about to burst, I asked black Kasparov where the bathroom was
located.

“Restrooms
are for customers only.”

“But
my dad just purchased some gas…”

“And
your father can shit here until his heart’s content. You, on the
other hand, are drinking the white man’s Coke like his ice is
colder than ours.”

I
pointed to the row of seven-ounce sodas in the cooler. “How much?”

“Dollar-fifty.”

“But
they’re seven cents across the street.”

“Buy
black or piss off. Literally.”

Feeling
sorry for me, and winning on points, black Bobby Fischer pointed into
the distance at an old bus station.

“See
that abandoned bus station next to the cotton gin?”

I
sprinted down the road. Although the building was no longer
operational, balls of cottonseed still blew in the wind like itchy
snowflakes. I made my way to the back, past the gin, the empty
pallets, a rusted forklift, and the ghost of Eli Whitney. The filthy
one-toilet bathroom buzzed with flies. The floors and the seat were
flypaper sticky. Glazed to a dull matte yellow by four generations of
good ol’ boys with bottomless bladders, pissing countless gallons
of drunk-on-the-job clear urine. The acrid stink of unflushed racism
and shit shriveled my face and put goosebumps on my arms. Slowly I
backed out. Underneath the faded WHITES ONLY stenciled on the grimy
lavatory door, I ran my finger through the grit and wrote THANK GOD,
then peed on an anthill. Because apparently the rest of the planet
was “Colored Only.”

3.
Joe

Lesson
about Castration on Career Day at the Middle School,
Ch 11, p.159

“Hello,
everybody,” I said, spitting on the “ground, because that’s
what farmers do. “Like you guys, I’m from Dickens…”

“Where?”
a bunch of students shouted. I might as well have said I was from
Atlantis. The children weren’t from “no Dickens.” And they
stood, throwing up gang signs and telling me where they were from:
Southside Joslyn Park Crip Gang. Varrio Trescientos y Cinco. Bedrock
Stoner Avenue Bloods.

In
retaliation I tossed up the closest thing the agricultural world has
to a gang sign and slid my hand across my throat—the universal sign
for Cut the Engine—and announced, “Well, I’m from the Farms,
which like all those places you’ve named, whether you know it or
not, is in Dickens, and Assistant Principal Molina asked me to
demonstrate what the average day for a farmer is like, and since
today is this calf’s eight-week anniversary, I thought I’d talk
about castration. There are three methods of castration…”

“What’s
‘castration,’ maestro?”

“It’s
a way of preventing male animals from fathering any children.”

“Don’t
they got cow rubbers?”

“That’s
not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican
Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a
way to control the population. It also makes them more docile. Anyone
know what ‘docile’ means?”

After
passing it under her runny nose, a skinny chalk-colored girl raised a
hand so disgustingly ashy, so white and dry-skinned, that it could
only be black.

“It
means bitchlike,” she said, volunteering to assist me by stepping
to the calf and flicking his downy ears with her fingers.

“Yes,
I guess you could say that it does.”

At
either the mention of “bitch” or the misguided notion they were
going to learn something about sex, the children closed in and
tightened the circle. The ones who weren’t in the “first two rows
were ducking and scooting around for better vantage points. A few
kids climbed to the top of the backstop’s rafters and peered down
on the procedure like med students in an operating theater. I
body-slammed the calf on its side and kneeled down on his neck and
rib cage, then directed my unlotioned cowhand to grab and spread his
hind legs until the little dogie’s genitals were exposed to the
elements. Seeing that I had their attention, I noticed Charisma
checking on her still-whimpering employee, then tiptoeing back aboard
Marpessa’s bus. “As I was saying, there are three methods of
castration: surgical, elastic, and bloodless. In elastic you place a
rubber band right here, preventing any blood flow going to the
testicles. That way they’ll eventually shrivel up and fall off.”
I grabbed the animal at the base of his scrotum and squeezed so hard
the calf and the schoolchildren jumped in unison. “For bloodless
castration, you crush the spermatic cords here and here.” Two firm
pinches of his vas deferens glans sent the calf into whimpering
convulsions of pain and embarrassment, and the students into spasms
of sadistic laughter. I whipped out a jackknife and held it up high,
twisting my hand in the air, expecting the blade to glint
dramatically in the sunlight, but it was too cloudy. “For surgery…”

“I
want to do it.” It was the little black girl, her clear brown eyes
fixed on the calf’s scrotum and bulging with scientific curiosity.

“I
think you need a permission slip from your parents.”

“What
parents? I live at El Nido,” she said, referring to the group home
on Wilmington, which in the neighborhood was tantamount to
name-dropping Sing Sing in a James Cagney movie.

“What’s
your name?”

“Sheila.
Sheila Clark.”

Sheila
and I changed places, clambering over and under one another without
taking any weight off the hapless calf. When I got to the back end, I
handed her the knife and the emasculator, which, like the garden
shears they resembled, and any other good tool, does exactly what its
name says it’s going to do. Two pints of blood, a surprisingly deft
removal of the top half of the scrotum, an artful yank of the testes
into the open air, an audible crunching severing of the spermatic
cord, a schoolyard full of shrieking pupils, teachers, and one
permanently sexually frustrated calf later, I was finishing up my
lecture for the benefit of Sheila Clark and three other
grade-schoolers intrigued enough to wade into the spreading pool of
blood to get a better look at the wound, while I wrestled with the
still squirming calf. “When the bull is lying here helpless on his
side, we in the farming industry like to call this the ‘recumbent
position,’ and now isn’t a bad time to inflict other painful
procedures on the animal, like dehorning, vaccinations, branding, and
marking the ears…”

4.
KumKum

Finding
a sister city for Dickens,
Ch 10, p. 145-148

I
never understood the concept of the sister city, but I’d always
been fascinated by it. The way that these twin towns, as they’re
sometimes known, choose and court each other seems more incestuous
than adoptive. Some unions, like that of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Paris
and Algiers, Honolulu and Hiroshima, are designed to signal an end to
hostilities and the beginning of peace and prosperity; arranged
marriages in which the cities learn to love one another over time.
Others are shotgun weddings, because one city, (e.g., Atlanta)
impregnated the other (e.g., Lagos) on a first date that spun
violently out of control centuries ago. Some cities marry up for
money and prestige; others marry down to piss off their mother
countries. Guess who’s coming to dinner? Kabul! Every now and then,
two cities meet and fall in love out of mutual respect and a love for
hiking, thunderstorms, and classic rock ’n’ roll. Think Amsterdam
and Istanbul. Buenos Aires and Seoul. But in the modern age, where
your average town is too busy trying to balance budgets and keep the
infrastructure from crumbling, most cities have a hard time finding a
soul mate, so they turn to Sister City Global, an international
matchmaking organization that finds love partners for lonely
municipalities. It was two days after Hominy’s birthday party and
although I—and the rest of Dickens—was still hungover, when Ms.
Susan Silverman, City Match Consultant, called about my application,
I couldn’t have been more excited.

“Hello.
We’re happy to have processed your application for International
Municipal Sisterhood, but we can’t seem to find Dickens on the map.
It’s near Los Angeles, right?”

“We
used to be an official city, but now it’s kind of occupied
territory. Like Guam, American Samoa, or the Sea of Tranquillity.”

“So
you’re near the ocean?”

“Yes,
an ocean of sorrow.”

“Well,
it doesn’t matter that you’re not a recognized city, Sister City
Global has paired communities before. For instance, Harlem, New
York’s sister city is Florence, Italy, because of their respective
renaissances. Dickens hasn’t had a renaissance, has it?”

“No,
we haven’t even had a single Day of Enlightenment.”

“That’s
too bad, but I do wish I’d known you were a coastal community,
because that makes a difference. But as it were, I ran your
demographics through Urbana, our matchmaking computer, and it came
back with three prospective sisters.”

I
grabbed my atlas and tried to guess who would be the lucky ladies. I
knew better than to expect Rome, Nairobi, Cairo, or Kyoto. But
figured second-tier hotties like Naples, Leipzig, and Canberra were
definitely in play.

“Let’s
see your three sister cities in order of compatibility …
Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa.”

While
I didn’t quite understand how Chernobyl had made the cut,
especially since it’s not even a city, at least Juárez and
Kinshasa were two major municipalities with global profiles, if not
besmirched reputations. But beggars can’t be choosy. “We’ll
accept all three!” I shouted into the phone.

“That’s
all well and good, but I’m afraid all three have rejected Dickens.”

“What?
Why? On what grounds?”

“Juárez
(aka the City That Never Stops Bleeding) feels that Dickens is too
violent. Chernobyl, while tempted, felt that, in the end, Dickens’s
proximity to the Los Angeles River and sewage treatment plants was a
problem. And questioned the attitudes of a citizenry so laissez-faire
about such rampant pollution. And Kinshasa, of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo…”

“Don’t
tell me Kinshasa, the poorest city in the poorest country in the
world, a place where the average per capita income is one goat bell,
two bootleg Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and three sips of potable
water per year, thinks we’re too poor to associate with.”

“No,
they think Dickens is too black. I believe ‘Them backward American
niggers ain’t ready!’ is how they put it.”

Too
embarrassed to tell Hominy that my efforts to find Dickens a sister
city had failed, I stalled him with little black lies. “Gdansk is
showing some interest. And we’re getting feelers from Minsk,
Kirkuk, Newark, and Nyack.” Eventually I ran out of cities that
ended in k or any other letter, and in a show of disappointment,
Hominy turned over a plastic milk crate, placed it in the driveway,
and placed himself on the auction block. Shirt off, breasts drooping,
standing next to a sign hammered into the lawn: FOR SALE—PRE-OWNED
NEGRO SLAVE—ONLY BEATEN ON THURSDAYS—GOOD CONVERSATION PIECE.

He
stayed there for over a week. Leaning on the horn wouldn’t budge
him from his perch, so whenever I needed to use the car, I’d have
to yell, “Look out, man, Quakers!” or “Here comes Frederick
Douglass and those damn abolitionists. Run for your lives!” which
would send him ducking into the cornstalks for cover. But the day I
needed to drive out to meet my apple tree connection he was being
especially stubborn.

“Hominy,
can you get your ass out of the way?”

“I
refuse to toil fo’ no massa who can’t manage a simple task such
as finding a sister city. And today, this here field nigger refuses
to move.”

“Field
nigger? Not that I want you to, but you don’t do a lick of work.
You spend all your time in the Jacuzzi.

I’ve
experienced direct discrimination based on race only once in my life.
One day I foolishly said to my father that there was no racism in
America. Only equal opportunity that black people kick aside because
we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves. Later that very
same day, in the middle of the night, he snatched me up out of bed,
and together we took an ill-prepared cross-country trip into deepest,
whitest America. After three days of nonstop driving, we ended up in
a nameless Mississippi town that was nothing more than a dusty
intersection of searing heat, crows, cotton fields, and, judging by
the excited look of anticipation on my fath er’s face,
unadulterated racism.

...

“Dad,
what are we doing here?”

“We’re
reckless eyeballing,” he said, removing a pair of 500x General
Patton binoculars from a fancy leather case, placing the black metal
monstrosities to his eyes, and turning toward me, his eyes big as
billiard balls through the thick lenses. “And I do mean reckless!”

Thanks
to years of my father’s black vernacular pop quizzes and an Ishmael
Reed book he kept on top of the toilet for years, I knew that
“reckless eyeballing” was the act of a black male deigning to
look at a southern white female. And there was my dad staring through
his binoculars at a storefront no more than thirty feet away, the
Mississippi sun glinting off the massive spectacles like two halogen
beacons. A woman stepped out onto the porch, an apron tied around her
gingham dress, a wicker broom in her hand. Shielding her eyes from
the glare, she began to sweep. The white men sat open-legged and
open-mouthed, aghast at the sheer fucking nigger audacity.

“Look
at those tits!” my father shouted, loud enough for the entire
cracker county to hear. Her chest wasn’t all that, but I imagine
that through the portable equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope
her B-cup breasts looked like the Hindenburg and the Goodyear blimp,
respectively. “Now, boy, now!”

“Now
what?”

“Go
out there and whistle at the white woman.”

“He
shoved me out the door, and kicking up a blinding cloud of red delta
dust, I crossed a two-lane highway covered with so much rock-hard
clay I couldn’t tell if the road had ever been paved. Obligingly, I
stood in front of the white lady and began to whistle. Or at least
tried to. What my father didn’t know is that I didn’t know how to
whistle. Whistling is one of the few things you learn at public
school. I was homeschooled, so my lunch hours were spent standing in
the backyard cotton patch reciting all the Negro Reconstruction
congressmen from memory: Blanche Bruce, Hiram Rhodes, John R. Lynch,
Josiah T. Walls … so although it sounds simple, I didn’t
know how to just put my lips together and blow. And for that matter,
I can’t split my fingers into the Vulcan high-sign, burp the
alphabet on command, or flip someone the bird without folding down
the non-insulting fingers with my free hand. Having a mouthful of
crackers didn’t help either, and the end result was an arrhythmic
spewing of pre-chewed oats all over her pretty pink apron.

“What’s
this crazy fool doing?” the white men asked each other between eye
rolls and tobacco expectorations. The most taciturn member of the
trio stood up and straightened out his No Niggers in NASCAR T-shirt.
Slowly removing the toothpick from his mouth, he said, “It’s the
‘Boléro.’ The little nigger is whistling ‘Boléro.’”

I
jumped up and down and pumped his hand in excitement. He was right,
of course, I was trying to re-create Ravel’s masterpiece. I may not
know how to whistle, but I could always carry a tune.

“The
‘Boléro’? Why, you stupid motherfucker!”

It
was Pops. Storming out of the car and moving so fast his dust cloud
kicked up its own dust cloud. He wasn’t happy, because apparently
not only did I not know how to whistle, I didn’t know what to
whistle. “You’re supposed to wolf whistle! Like this…”
Recklessly eyeballing her the whole way, he pursed his lips and let
go a wolf whistle so lecherous and libidinous it curled both the
white woman’s pretty painted toes and the dainty red ribbon in her
blond hair. Now it was her turn. And my father stood there, lustful
and black, as she just as defiantly not only recklessly eyeballed him
back but recklessly rubbed his dick through his pants. Kneading his
crotch like pizza dough for all she was worth.

Dad
quickly whispered something in her ear, handed me a five-dollar bill,
said I’ll be back, and together they hurried into the car and tore
out down some dirt road. Leaving me to be lynched for his crimes.

“Is
there a black buck Rebecca ain’t fucked from here to Natchez?”

“Well,
least she knows what she likes. Your dumb peckerwood ass still ain’t
decided whether you like men or not.”

“I’m
bisexual. I likes both.”

“Ain’t
no such thing. You either is or you ain’t. Man crush on Dale
Earnhardt, my ass.”

6.
Thommo

The
bystander effect and other experiments his father conducted on Me,
Ch 1, p.28-30

For
the twenty years I knew him, Dad had been the interim dean of the
department of psychology at West Riverside Community College. For
him, having grown up as a stable manager’s son on a small horse
ranch in Lexington, Kentucky, farming was nostalgic. And when he came
out west with a teaching position, the opportunity to live in a black
community and breed horses was too good to pass up, even if he’d
never really been able to afford the mortgage and the upkeep.

Maybe
if he’d been a comparative psychologist, some of the horses and
cows would’ve lived past the age of three and the tomatoes would’ve
had fewer worms, but in his heart he was more interested in black
liberty than in pest management and the well-being of the animal
kingdom. And in his quest to unlock the keys to mental freedom, I was
his Anna Freud, his little case study, and when he wasn’t teaching
me how to ride, he was replicating famous social science experiments
with me as both the control and the experimental group. Like any
“primitive” Negro child lucky enough to reach the formal
operational stage, I’ve come to realize that I had a shitty
upbringing that I’ll never be able to live down.

I
suppose if one takes into account the lack of an ethics committee to
oversee my dad’s childrearing methodologies, the experiments
started innocently enough. In the early part of the twentieth
century, the behaviorists Watson and Rayner, in an attempt to prove
that fear was a learned behavior, exposed nine-month-old “Little
Albert” to neutral stimuli like white rats, monkeys, and sheaves of
burned newsprint. Initially, the baby test subject was unperturbed by
the series of simians, rodents, and flames, but after Watson
repeatedly paired the rats with unconscionably loud noises, over time
“Little Albert” developed a fear not only of white rats but of
all things furry. When I was seven months, Pops placed objects like
toy police cars, cold cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Richard Nixon
campaign buttons, and a copy of The Economist in my bassinet, but
instead of conditioning me with a deafening clang, I learned to be
afraid of the presented stimuli because they were accompanied by him
taking out the family .38 Special and firing several window-rattling
rounds into the ceiling, while shouting, “Nigger, go back to
Africa!” loud enough to make himself heard over the quadraphonic
console stereo blasting “Sweet Home Alabama” in the living room.
To this day I’ve never been able to sit through even the most
mundane TV crime drama, I have a strange affinity for Neil Young, and
whenever I have trouble sleeping, I don’t listen to recorded
rainstorms or crashing waves but to the Watergate tapes.

Family
lore has it that from ages one to four, he’d tied my right hand
behind my back so I’d grow up to be left-handed, right-brained, and
well-centered. I was eight when my father wanted to test the
“bystander effect” as it applies to the “black community.” He
replicated the infamous Kitty Genovese case with a prepubescent me
standing in for the ill-fated Ms. Genovese, who, in 1964, was robbed,
raped, and stabbed to death in the apathetic streets of New York, her
plaintive Psychology 101 textbook cries for help ignored by dozens of
onlookers and neighborhood residents. Hence, the “bystander
effect”: the more people around to provide help, the less likely
one is to receive help. Dad hypothesized that this didn’t apply to
black people, a loving race whose very survival has been dependent on
helping one another in times of need. So he made me stand on the
busiest intersection in the neighborhood, dollar bills bursting from
my pockets, the latest and shiniest electronic gadgetry jammed into
my ear canals, a hip-hop heavy gold chain hanging from my neck, and,
inexplicably, a set of custom-made carpeted Honda Civic floor mats
draped over my forearm like a waiter’s towel, and as tears streamed
from my eyes, my own father mugged me. He beat me down in front of a
throng of bystanders, who didn’t stand by for long. The mugging
wasn’t two punches to the face old when the people came, not to my
aid, but to my father’s. Assisting him in my ass kicking, they
happily joined in with flying elbows and television wrestling throws.
One woman put me in a well-executed and, in retrospect, merciful,
rear-naked chokehold. When I regained consciousness to see my father
surveying her and the rest of my attackers, their faces still sweaty
and chests still heaving from the efforts of their altruism, I
imagined that, like mine, their ears were still ringing with my
high-pitched screams and their frenzied laughter.

“How
satisfied were you with your act of selflessness?”

Not
at all Somewhat satisfied Very satisfied

1
2 3 4 5

On
the way home, Pops put a consoling arm around my aching shoulders and
delivered an apologetic lecture about his failure to take into
account the “bandwagon effect.”

Posted by
Management - Learning from Experiences by Reflection
at
1:39 PM

2 comments:

Thank you for the appreciation, dear Hemjit. I don't think I wrote much, perhaps because it was the second time on Paul Beatty's The Sellout, the first being when KumKum and I encountered him at the Kolkata Lit Meet, KALAM, in January.

I am looking forward to the next Poetry session avidly when we all read from the English Romantics ...